The NetBeans development environment has achieved Apache top-level project status

Apache Software Foundation Organization announced on the assignment of the integrated development environment NetBeans as a primary Apache project. In the fall of 2016, Oracle made the decision transferred the project under the auspices of the Apache Foundation, after which it transferred 4 million lines of code and the rights to all related source texts for NetBeans, as well as the trademark 'NetBeans', the domain 'netbeans.org', and some infrastructure elements. The remaining 1.5 million lines of code, covering modules for supporting Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Groovy languages, were been submitted in 2018.

Since October 2016, the project has been in the Apache incubator, where its ability to follow the development and management principles adopted in the Apache community and based on the ideas of meritocracy was evaluated. During its time in the incubator, Apache NetBeans releases 9, 10 and 11were formed, which were released with limited support for programming languages (Java, PHP, JavaScript, and Groovy). The return of support for C/C++ is expected in one of the upcoming releases.

Now, Apache NetBeans is recognized as ready for standalone existence, not requiring additional oversight. Project components have been re-licensed—the code has been transitioned from copyleft licenses GPLv2 and CDDL to the Apache 2.0 license. The reason for the project's transfer was stated to be the desire to continue development on a neutral platform with an independent management model to simplify community and other companies' involvement in the project's development (for example, internal projects based on NetBeans are being developed by Boeing, Airbus, NASA, and NATO).

It is worth noting that the NetBeans project was established started in 1996 by Czech students with the aim of creating a Delphi equivalent for Java. In 1999, the project was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and in 2000, it was published as open-source and transitioned to the category of free projects. In 2010, NetBeans came under the ownership of Oracle, which acquired Sun Microsystems. Throughout the years, NetBeans has developed as the primary environment for Java developers, competing with Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, but recently it has actively promoted support for JavaScript, PHP, and C/C++. The active user base of NetBeans is estimated at 1.5 million developers.

Source: opennet.ru